Chapter 40

"Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every
manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one
manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera."
His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer
people were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no
longer bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until
that was found his life must stand still.

After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met
Ruth on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her
brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and
that Norman attempted to wave him aside.

"If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman
threatened. "She does not wish to speak with you, and your
insistence is insult."

"If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll
get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly. "And now,
get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I'm going to
talk with Ruth."

"I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her.

She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.

"The question I asked in my letter," he prompted.

Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a
swift look.

She shook her head.

"Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded.

"It is." She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation.
"It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am
ashamed to meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know.
That is all I can tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I
never wish to see you again."

"Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are
not stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved
me."

A blush drove the pallor from her face.

"After what has passed?" she said faintly. "Martin, you do not
know what you are saying. I am not common."

"You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman
blurted out, starting on with her.

Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his
coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.

It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went
up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it.
He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about
him like an awakened somnambulist. He noticed "Overdue" lying on
the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen. There was
in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness. Here was
something undone. It had been deferred against the completion of
something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he
would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he
would do next he did not know. All that he did know was that a
climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had been
reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He
was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out
what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter.
Nothing seemed to matter.

For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing
nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the
postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of THE PARTHENON.
A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted. "We have submitted
the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and
he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As
an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you
that we have set it for the August number, our July number being
already made up. Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr.
Brissenden. Please send by return mail his photograph and
biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly
telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price."

Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty
dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then,
too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained. Well, he had
been right, after all. Here was one magazine editor who knew real
poetry when he saw it. And the price was splendid, even though it
was for the poem of a century. As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin
knew that he was the one critic for whose opinions Brissenden had
any respect.

Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the
houses and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that
he was not more elated over his friend's success and over his own
signal victory. The one critic in the United States had pronounced
favorably on the poem, while his own contention that good stuff
could find its way into the magazines had proved correct. But
enthusiasm had lost its spring in him, and he found that he was
more anxious to see Brissenden than he was to carry the good news.
The acceptance of THE PARTHENON had recalled to him that during his
five days' devotion to "Overdue" he had not heard from Brissenden
nor even thought about him. For the first time Martin realized the
daze he had been in, and he felt shame for having forgotten his
friend. But even the shame did not burn very sharply. He was numb
to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones concerned in the
writing of "Overdue." So far as other affairs were concerned, he
had been in a trance. For that matter, he was still in a trance.
All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed remote
and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and less
shook if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had
suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head.

At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden's room, and hurried down
again. The room was empty. All luggage was gone.

"Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?" he asked the clerk, who
looked at him curiously for a moment.

"Haven't you heard?" he asked.

Martin shook his head.

"Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed.
Suicide. Shot himself through the head."

"Is he buried yet?" Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one
else's voice, from a long way off, asking the question.

"No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged
by his people saw to the arrangements."

"They were quick about it, I must say," Martin commented.

"Oh, I don't know. It happened five days ago."

"Five days ago?"

"Yes, five days ago."

"Oh," Martin said as he turned and went out.

At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram
to THE PARTHENON, advising them to proceed with the publication of
the poem. He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay
his carfare home, so he sent the message collect.

Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days and nights came
and went, and he sat at his table and wrote on. He went nowhere,
save to the pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when
he was hungry and had something to cook, and just as methodically
went without when he had nothing to cook. Composed as the story
was, in advance, chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw and
developed an opening that increased the power of it, though it
necessitated twenty thousand additional words. It was not that
there was any vital need that the thing should be well done, but
that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well. He worked on
in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling
like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former
life. He remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the
spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense enough to
know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were really
dead did unaware of it.

Came the day when "Overdue" was finished. The agent of the type-
writer firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while
Martin, on the one chair, typed the last pages of the final
chapter. "Finis," he wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it
was indeed finis. He watched the type-writer carried out the door
with a feeling of relief, then went over and lay down on the bed.
He was faint from hunger. Food had not passed his lips in thirty-
six hours, but he did not think about it. He lay on his back, with
closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or stupor
slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness. Half in delirium,
he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden
had been fond of quoting to him. Maria, listening anxiously
outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance. The
words in themselves were not significant to her, but the fact that
he was saying them was. "I have done," was the burden of the poem.

"'I have done -
Put by the lute.
Song and singing soon are over
As the airy shades that hover
In among the purple clover.
I have done -
Put by the lute.
Once I sang as early thrushes
Sing among the dewy bushes;
Now I'm mute.
I am like a weary linnet,
For my throat has no song in it;
I have had my singing minute.
I have done.
Put by the lute.'"

Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove,
where she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion's
share of chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from
the bottom of the pot. Martin roused himself and sat up and began
to eat, between spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been
talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever.

After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the
edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw
nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the
morning's mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into
his darkened brain. It is THE PARTHENON, he thought, the August
PARTHENON, and it must contain "Ephemera." If only Brissenden were
here to see!

He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
"Ephemera" had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and
Beardsley-like margin decorations. On one side of the head-piece
was Brissenden's photograph, on the other side was the photograph
of Sir John Value, the British Ambassador. A preliminary editorial
note quoted Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets in
America, and the publication of "Ephemera" was THE PARTHENON'S.
"There, take that, Sir John Value!" Cartwright Bruce was described
as the greatest critic in America, and he was quoted as saying that
"Ephemera" was the greatest poem ever written in America. And
finally, the editor's foreword ended with: "We have not yet made
up our minds entirely as to the merits of "Ephemera"; perhaps we
shall never be able to do so. But we have read it often, wondering
at the words and their arrangement, wondering where Mr. Brissenden
got them, and how he could fasten them together." Then followed
the poem.

"Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man," Martin murmured,
letting the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.

The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted
apathetically that he was not nauseated very much. He wished he
could get angry, but did not have energy enough to try. He was too
numb. His blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal
flow of indignation. After all, what did it matter? It was on a
par with all the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois
society.

"Poor Briss," Martin communed; "he would never have forgiven me."

Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which
had once contained type-writer paper. Going through its contents,
he drew forth eleven poems which his friend had written. These he
tore lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket.
He did it languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of
the bed staring blankly before him.

How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his
sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white. It
was curious. But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that
it was a coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges. Next, in
the line of breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe.
In the stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth
dipping a flashing paddle. He recognized him. He was Moti, the
youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was Tahiti, and beyond
that smoking reef lay the sweet land of Papara and the chief's
grass house by the river's mouth. It was the end of the day, and
Moti was coming home from the fishing. He was waiting for the rush
of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef. Then he saw himself,
sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past,
dipping a paddle that waited Moti's word to dig in like mad when
the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them. Next, he
was no longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was
crying out, they were both thrusting hard with their paddles,
racing on the steep face of the flying turquoise. Under the bow
the water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled with
driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long-echoing roar,
and the canoe floated on the placid water of the lagoon. Moti
laughed and shook the salt water from his eyes, and together they
paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where Tati's grass walls
through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the setting sun.

The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of
his squalid room. He strove in vain to see Tahiti again. He knew
there was singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing
in the moonlight, but he could not see them. He could see only the
littered writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had
stood, and the unwashed window-pane. He closed his eyes with a
groan, and slept.